


Zama

by dirtybinary



Category: Ancient History RPF, Classical Greece and Rome History & Literature RPF, Punic Wars RPF
Genre: Alternate History, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 18:00:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12658608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: They fight the battle over and over, in an infinitude of ways.





	Zama

They fight the battle over and over, in an infinitude of ways.

Sometimes it happens in the usual fashion, with the half-trained elephants trumpeting down the empty lanes between the Roman cohorts, and the knifequick Numidians circling round to shatter their ranks from the rear. Hannibal stays with the last line of loyal diehards from his Italian troops until Maharbal shoves him bodily onto a horse and screams at him to go, go, save yourself, it’s not over as long as you’re alive. (Sometimes that’s true and sometimes they don’t get to find out.) Other times he does not save himself. He leads the final defiant charge like his brother before him and lets them cut him down with his city’s name on his lips, and at least once, he gets close enough to Scipio to see the sorrow in his eyes.

In no universe do they take him alive. They try, but on that count his ingenuity never fails him. 

“Do you ever get the feeling,” Scipio says, after he’s rejected Hannibal’s terms yet again and they leave the tent with no peace made, “that we’ve done this before?” 

They always send the interpreters away. They speak in Greek, alone, with Maharbal and Laelius and the rest of the bodyguards eyeing them and each other at a wary distance. Scipio looks the same every time, shining, golden, unbearably young in the absence of his lictors; and he always says no, whether Hannibal opens with _Trust not to the vicissitudes of your good fortune_ or _You see me here before the walls of my city, begging for it to be spared._ “This is the first time we’ve met.” 

Scipio squints at him in the violent midday sun. There will be an eclipse today, the astronomers say. “Yes. But I feel as if I’ve known you all my life.” 

Sometimes Hannibal wins. His desperate veterans punch through the Roman centre and the elephants complete the rout, trampling the eagle standards in a contagion of panic; or else Mago shows up alive against all hope to turn the tide with his Ligurians, sea-tossed, limping, still smug in that insufferable way only lastborn children can be. Scipio gets away, or he does not. Sometimes he is already gone when Hannibal finds him amid the debris of battle, and other times he is ebbing away—“Draw the spear,” a shadow of a whisper, and Hannibal says, “Hold on, I’ll fetch my doctor,” and Scipio says, with ferocious strength, “I only want you to do it,” and so Hannibal draws the spear from Scipio’s chest in a hot spurt of scarlet and closes his eyes, after.

It is much more fun when Scipio survives. “All right, you had a point about the vicissitudes of fortune,” he says, with a very patrician flick of his chin, as Hannibal leans over to unravel the rope from his wrists. “If you compare me to Regulus one more time I might have to assassinate you.”

“I didn’t mention Regulus,” says Hannibal. He might have made reference to Scipio Asina at their parley, but he deserves to indulge himself once in a while. 

“ _This_ time.” Scipio scrubs the back of his hand across his eyes, looking very much like a child past his bedtime. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many Spartan vowels in one tent. They’re all starting to run together in my head.”

So Hannibal speaks Latin the next time round, as a surprise, though the words— _I come unarmed before you now to sue for peace_ —are bitter on his tongue. Scipio smiles. He gets the joke. He refuses Hannibal’s terms all the same, and they fight again, for all the good it does them. Some capricious god sweeps them together in the flood of battle: Hannibal knocks Scipio from his horse in the same moment as Scipio’s Spanish gladius flashes between his ribs, and they die there on the field within hours of each other, never knowing how it ends. 

“I think I missed you last time,” says Hannibal, frowning. They have come out of their tent to watch darkness go sliding over the face of the sun. Even from their patch of neutral ground they can hear the upraised voices, as men of both camps try to convince themselves that the terrible omen is for the other side. He could swear Maharbal and Laelius exchange a wry look.

“Cato got me recalled before you showed up,” says Scipio. The memory of it casts a harsh pallour over his face. He does not look so young this time; the illness in Spain has left him with a pinched, hunted look about the cheekbones. “Fair’s fair. Time before last, I waited months for you only to hear you died in Bruttium.”

“Not the most rewarding experience,” Hannibal agrees. “You really ought to accept my terms.”

“Then you’ll return to Italy as soon as my back is turned and start the war anew.” 

Hannibal can’t say if it’s true. That’s one life neither of them has lived yet. The noonday sky is blooming with strange stars, and just overhead, the Hunter’s belt seems to crown Scipio’s head like a diadem. “The gods themselves are telling us we should stop fighting.” 

Scipio turns his head, ruining the illusion. “I didn’t think you were superstitious.”

“I grew up during two wars,” says Hannibal. “Of course I’m superstitious.”

The omen turns out to be for him. It’s not one of the times he manages to get away, but then, that’s what his poisoned ring is for. 

For a while, there are no victors. Scipio’s troops mutiny, and Hannibal’s starve. Mago is dead again. He dies in Liguria, or just past Sardinia, or makes it all the way to the coast of Hadrumetum before succumbing to his wound in sight of their father’s estates, and Hannibal buries him with his own hands. Masinissa plunges into a dark night of the soul over Sophonisba and vanishes with all his cavalry, leaving the two armies to slug each other to nothing on the wind-scorched plain. Hannibal takes his son up to the temple of Ba’al Hammon on the Byrsa height and says, over a bowl of sacrificial blood, "Swear this to me." 

“What was it Thucydides said about the Athenians?” asks Scipio, as they watch the sky darken from the flap of their tent. The sun is a bitten wafer, the clouds a haze of soiled wool. “That they were born never to know peace or to let anyone else know it? I think we’re doomed to fight this battle till the end of time because you’re just too damned proud to give up.” 

He’s hacked off most of his hair. Hannibal studies him in the eerie half-light, trying to remember what he looked like with the fair hair curling round his face to the shoulders. Like an Achilles who made it to the weary age of thirty-three, he decides. “I’m not the one who keeps rejecting perfectly reasonable terms.”

“You offer me what I already have,” says Scipio. “Sicily, Sardinia, Spain—don’t make that face, you know it’s true. You only come to our parleys to stall.” 

“And to see you,” Hannibal points out. 

Scipio gives him a withering look. “That went without saying.”

He looks so worn down, he’s nearly blurry at the edges. They all are. There is no more nervous speculation from the guards waiting outside, no muttered prayer. Romans and Carthaginians alike sit on the grass in an almost companionable huddle, dull-eyed and silent, watching the shadows lengthen as they wait to go through with the battle one more time. This, Hannibal thinks, is the lot to which he and Scipio have consigned them all, this thankless Sisyphean labour.

“What if,” he hears himself say, “I were to offer my own surrender?”

Scipio looks up sharply. Full dark, now: the constellations open their many eyes and glint down like a field of spears. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” says Hannibal. “For me to march in chains at your triumph?” 

It is a gamble. But he knows what he would do were he the one now receiving an enemy’s surrender, and he knows his opponent to be a mirrored Narcissus-image of himself. “By Jupiter,” says Scipio, at the end of a long breath. In all their multitude of tent-meetings, Hannibal has never seen him look so back-footed, and like the eclipse it is a vaguely apocalyptic sight. “Who says I want that?”

“What _do_ you want?”

Scipio does not answer. He flings his way back into the tent and paces once around its cramped confines; short, curt, violent steps. “Do you mean it? Why?”

Hannibal feels for his ring, just to reassure himself it’s still there: a habitual movement by now, and one Scipio does not miss. “If it would save my city—if it would spare the lives of my men—it would be selfish of me not to offer.” 

Scipio stares at him. Because he has to, but also because it is true, Hannibal adds, “You understand I would not give myself up to anyone else.”

Another tight circle around the tent. Hannibal has paced like this often enough himself to recognise the gait of a trapped lion, to feel the restlessness in his own bones. If he has misjudged, this is the end of him. “You know the Senate will eat me alive if I don’t fight,” says Scipio.

“They’ll eat you alive either way.”

Scipio makes to swipe his hair out of his eyes, and stops when he finds nothing there. “Up till now,” he says, “I never thought you were serious about peace.” 

“I’m always serious,” says Hannibal. 

They both have to smile at that. “I don’t want your surrender,” says Scipio. “I don’t want to ruin you. That’s not what I’m here for. Perhaps it was once, but—”

He lets the thought trail off. Hannibal completes it for him. “But things are just a little different every time.”

Scipio nods. “You always understand.”

There is a tight, airless pause, and then he switches to formal Latin. “Your terms are satisfactory to the Senate and People of Rome. Your original terms. I accept them.”

There is a change in the quality of the light. A sliver of sun has become visible again through the tent’s thin walls, casting long-toothed crescent shadows over everything. This seems an augury, too. It is difficult to breathe. “Indeed?” 

“I don’t want to see you in chains,” says Scipio. “I just—”

He shies a sidelong glance at Hannibal. “I just want this to be over.”

It seems Hannibal has judged him right after all. Sounds begin to filter back into the world: the whicker of horses; the rustle of tall grass; the low voices of their waiting guards, talking in a strange mix of languages. Laelius says something about skiving sun-gods in broken Phoenician, and Maharbal laughs. It is as if some disjoint in the fabric of the cosmos has healed itself, and the earth spins right on its axis again. “I think it _is_ over,” says Hannibal. 

“It must be,” says Scipio, “if we’re calling off the battle.” 

There is something furled tight beneath the cool, level tones of the proconsul, perhaps the same thing Hannibal can feel uncoiling in himself. An armistice is a frightening thought, when he was at war before he was old enough to know what war was—eight when he climbed onto his sister’s shoulders on the harbour wall for a glimpse of the rebel army laying siege to Carthage, and younger still on the half-remembered mountain in Sicily. But he looks at the relief dawning on Scipio’s face—his counterpart, his double, his shadow-twin—and he thinks maybe, maybe, they were born to know peace after all.

He throws open the tent flap to admit a shaft of golden light. “Shame,” he says. His heart, last felt rattling high up in his throat, is starting to settle. “I’d rather looked forward to beating you again.” 

“Don’t exaggerate, old man,” says Scipio, in Greek once more. His voice is golden too, hued with smiling exhaustion. “You haven’t beaten me in a while.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“I think I ought to congratulate myself,” says a voice, shattering the stillness of the library. “This is the first place I looked for you, and behold, here you are.” 

It’s a voice Hannibal has not heard in years, save only in confused dreams. He looks up from his scroll of Mimnermos to find Scipio standing over his couch, perfectly framed between the bright window and the map of the African dominions on the far wall. Like all preternatural manifestations, this takes a moment to recover from. Aside from the current Ptolemy and some of the library scribes, no one here is supposed to know who Hannibal is. “How did you find me?” 

“I know how you think,” says Scipio, who—last Hannibal heard—was in Athens enjoying his self-imposed exile in rather spectacular fashion. “Besides, how many one-eyed Phoenician scholars calling themselves Keraunos could there be?” 

He has a point. Places like Alexandria have a way of drawing in people like them, sooner rather than later. “I heard your friends in the Senate were trying to entice you home,” says Hannibal.

Scipio laughs. There is bitterness in that laugh, mixed with other things. “Not a chance. I’m here to stay.”

He perches himself on the edge of the couch, and Hannibal shifts reflexively to make room for him. Joined by some shared thought, they both look at the map hanging above the crates of just-copied papyri, at the delicate swirls of river and coastline and mountain and sea. Scipio says, “I doubt I could find Zama on it if I tried.” 

Zama is only a little village of no import, and of course it is not on the map. There was no battle there. There has never been a battle there. Hannibal cannot for the life of him think why the name should ring in his head with such a hollow, dreadful resonance, except that it was where he and Scipio hammered out the terms of the armistice between them—an armistice only reluctantly accepted by both their Senates, and which their enemies had eventually used to drive them into exile. But exile was always going to be inevitable.

“Can you believe,” says Hannibal, “that we’ve only met once before?” 

“It baffles me,” says Scipio. “I still dream about that damnable tent.”

Hannibal casts at the hollow places in his head, the way one might worry at the gap left by a missing tooth, and comes up with nothing. Their tent on the plain was a place of peace. It holds no regrets for him. “We ended the war,” he says gently. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

Some tension goes out of Scipio’s spine. He smiles, and bumps Hannibal’s knee with his own. “Me neither,” he says. “Are you reading Mimnermos? Is it the one about the eclipse?” 

“Get your own,” says Hannibal half-heartedly. But he doesn’t protest when Scipio plucks the scroll from his hand, and starts to read aloud for the both of them.

**Author's Note:**

> There's a quote from the Harold Lamb biography I really liked: _"Hannibal seems to have read Scipio's mind. There will always be a question as to how much the two of them talked over at their meeting before Zama [...] Certainly both gained an unusual understanding of the other's character. For Hannibal put his faith in Scipio's word."_
> 
> All quotes in italics are adapted from Hannibal's speech to Scipio in Livy 30.30. As far as I can tell, Keraunos is the rough Greek equivalent of the name Barca (both meaning thunderbolt/flash), and was a popular epithet among military types in the Hellenistic world around this time. Mimnermos was a Greek poet of the 7th century BCE who, apparently, wrote about a total solar eclipse.
> 
> check out my original novel [elegy](http://valeaida.tumblr.com/post/149576789996/an-elegy-info-post) for more enemies-as-lovers | or say hi on [tumblr](http://enemyofrome.tumblr.com)


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